Why is it that women supposedly cook, but men are chefs?
Photograph: Owen Kolasinski/BFAnyc.com/REX

Kathleen Blake always knew she wanted to farm and cook, but when she was growing up in Iowa, her parents told her that she would be better off marrying a farmer than being one. Today, many years after a move to California that changed her life (“I had never seen arugula before!”, she told me), Blake owns and runs The Rusty Spoon in Orlando, Florida, a restaurant focused on local and sustainable cooking.

We could all stand to learn a few things from female chefs like Blake – and not just about how to perfectly braise short ribs or create the best pasta dough. (Though I’m open to tips on both, thanks.) They seem to have figured out how to navigate a traditionally male field – and the sexism that comes with it – with a deceptively simple secret to success.

As I talked with Blake and a few other of the nine women cooking in this week’s James Beard’s Pioneers and Legends dinner, a culinary event featuring upcoming and established female chefs, I noticed something out-of-the-ordinary. When I asked these women how they got their start, or what led to their success, the chefs talked very little about their many accolades and accomplishments. What they couldn’t stop talking about, however, was each other. Each rattled off the names of their various mentors and supporters, women who shared some new technique or encouraged them to join a professional network.

“Women chefs are really supportive of each other,” said pastry chef Emily Luchetti. Luchetti, who is the executive pastry chef for Big Night Restaurant Group and Board Chair of the James Beard Foundation, told me, “We all want to be good individually for our food and careers, but we recognise that everybody has their own style and everybody can win.”

Chef and restaurateur Mary Sue Milliken, another Pioneers and Legends chef and one of the youngest founders of WCR, and said that, while there was already a strong network of women in place already, not everyone had access to that same network, and there needed to be “better leadership training, better role models, and better education.”

Katherine Miller, Executive Director of the Chef Action Network – an organisation that helps chefs use their platform to work on issues that matter outside of the kitchen – said that generally, though, “‘female chefs’ just want to be ‘chefs’.”

“They’re all super supportive of one another, and talk about gender politics in the kitchen and how it’s changed,” Miller told me. But mostly, she said, they want to prop up other female chefs without making “into a male-female thing.”

Sometimes, though, that sexism in the kitchen is too blatant to ignore. For instance, when Milliken interviewed for one of her first jobs, the would-be employer told her, “you’re too pretty and you’ll cause havoc”. He then asked her if she would rather work as a hat check girl. (To his credit, he later hired Milliken and went on to become her mentor.)

Late last year, two-star Michelin chef Tom Kerridge said while “girls in the kitchen” are fine, women don’t have “a lot of that fire in a chef’s belly you need”. Chef Dominique Crenn – also two-Michelin-starred – penned the perfect response in VICE: “Can you imagine a female chef saying about men what he said about women in the kitchen?! No, you can’t. We don’t roll that way.”

Orlando’s Blake said that she’s been passed over for major promotions while working for men and faced hurdles as a mother to four children – employers openly worried that she wouldn’t be available to them morning, noon and night. She said that she managed by carefully and consciously researching potential jobs, and found that, once she started working for other women, they were “very family oriented” and gave her more flexibility.

Now Blake is paying it forward. She just worked out a schedule with an employee who is a single mother that’s centered around accommodating her child’s after-school program.

“Sometimes [women chefs] can’t find a family-friendly kitchen, so they build it themselves,” Miller told me. Milliken said the same thing about opening a restaurant with her partner Susan Feniger: “We felt the best way to navigate a male-dominated field was to own our own restaurant and work for ourselves, rather than keep working for men.”

While these chefs probably haven’t found the cure-all to working around sexism – networks of mentors, sharing ideas, and family-friendly schedules can only go so far in ending misogyny in the culinary industry – it does seem they’re making a difference for themselves and other women, and having fun while doing it.

“It’s one of the things that’s so great about women in the food world, we’re so inclusive – come on, let’s cook!” Luchetti says.

Oh, and Blake? She didn’t end up marrying a farmer ... but her husband does work the front-of-the-house at her restaurant.